Google Fixed Widespread Gmail Service Glitch

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) fixed their widespread Gmail service glitch that affected close to fifty percent of the service’s users. This particular glitch also took about ten hours to fix.

Google’s Gmail delivery delay

On Monday, affected Gmail users noticed delivery delays for emails, and difficulties attaching files to emails. This was attributed to an unexplained glitch acknowledged by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) at 10:30 am Eastern Standard Time in the United States. By 10:00 pm, the search giant claimed it was all patched up. According to the Google Apps Status, the glitch started around 9:00 am and was resolved around 6:30 pm. Those who were affected by the glitch include those who use Google’s free Gmail and companies/organizations who use paid Google Apps cloud collaboration/email suite.

Since this outage impacted most of the workday on both coasts, the outage was significant. Those who use Gmail for work vented their frustrations on Twitter and forums. The last significant outage Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) had was over a year ago when over 425 million users were affected.

Cause of the glitch

TJ Keitt for Forrester Research explained, “Data centers hosting multi-tenant collaboration services aren’t immune to disruptions. So, when they happen, the way to judge the vendor is on how well they identify and resolve the problem, and then inform the public to how they resolved the issue. They have clearly not communicated this publicly, so I hope they’ve been forthcoming with this information with their clients.”

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) shared an apology on their status website. They explained that the severity and impact length varied among users. About 29 percent of the received messages were delayed on average 2.6 seconds while other emails were delayed longer. Gartner analyst Matthew Cain thinks this message raises questions on what should be considered downtime, particularly if it relates to service-level agreements from application vendors on the cloud.